Veuve Clicquot has buried 300 bottles and 50 magnums of Champagne in the Baltic Sea as part of an ageing experiment.
The Clicquot Yellow Label Brut, Rosé Vintage 2004 and Demi-Sec bottles were plunged into the bitter Baltic waters by crane, within a specially constructed metal cage, reported Decanter.com.
The stash was placed at a depth of 43 metres, adjacent to private island Silverska, off the Finnish coast, as a tribute to the area’s discovery of ‘buried treasure’ in 2010.
Just four years ago in the same spot of the ice-cold sea, 168 Champagne bottles were recovered from a shipwreck from the mid-nineteenth century. The booty included Veuve Clicquot bottles that dated as far back as 1839, along with Heidsieck & Co and Juglar vintages – the latter house now defunct.
But this new endeavour will involve a host of Champagne experts, who will periodically test the seabed bubbly against bottles within Veuve Clicquot’s cellars, after two or three years.
"The idea is to try and replicate the [2010] discovery by sinking a selection of various cuvees to the seabed to see how the wine ages when compared with the same wines in Clicquot's own cellars in Reims,” said chief winemaker Dominique Demarville.
"The sea remains at a pretty constant four degrees celsius compared to our cellar's 11 degrees. And at that depth the pressure of around 5 atmospheres is very close to the pressure inside the bottles,” he told Decanter.com.